6/8/2019 Africa's Lost Kingdoms | by Howard W. French | The New York Review of Books Africa’s Lost Kingdoms Howard W. French JUNE 27, 2019 ISSUE The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François­Xavier Fauvelle, translated from the French by Troy Tice Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $29.95 African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa by Michael A. Gomez Princeton University Press, 505 pp., $45.00 African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic by Herman L. Bennett University of Pennsylvania Press, 226 pp., $34.95 A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by Toby Green University of Chicago Press, 614 pp., $40.00 Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa an exhibition at the Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois, January 26–July 21, 2019; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, September 21, 2019–February 23, 2020; and the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., April 8–November 29, 2020 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Kathleen Bickford Berzock Block Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 311 pp., $65.00 There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disney cartoons that depict barely clothed African cannibals merrily stewing their victims in giant pots suspended above pit fires.1 Among intellectuals there is a Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris wealth of appalling examples. Voltaire Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on said of Africans, “A time will come, camelback; detail from The Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Majorcan mapmaker Abraham Cresques, 1375 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-lost-kingdoms/ 1/10 6/8/2019 Africa's Lost Kingdoms | by Howard W. French | The New York Review of Books without a doubt, when these animals will know how to cultivate the earth well, to embellish it with houses and gardens, and to know the routes of the stars. Time is a must, for everything.” Hegel’s views of Africa were even more sweeping: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” One can hear echoes of such views even today from Western politicians. Donald Trump referred to a number of African nations as “shithole countries” in 2018, and French president Emmanuel Macron said in 2017, “The challenge Africa faces is completely different and much deeper” than those faced by Europe. “It is civilizational.” It may remain a little­known fact, but Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms, and they admirably complicate our understanding of Africa’s past and present. The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François­Xavier Fauvelle reveals—to many readers almost certainly for the first time—the existence of what specialists increasingly construe as medieval Africa. For Fauvelle, a leading French scholar of the continent, this was a period between the antiquity of places like Egypt, Nubia, and Aksum, all of which left spectacular archaeological legacies, and around 1500, after which Africa was deeply scarred by the slave trade and Western imperialism. In a succession of brisk chapters, Fauvelle makes the case that medieval Africa suffered no dearth of cultural accomplishments. There is, for example, evidence of long­distance trade as early as the ninth century between northern African settlements and caravan towns like Aoudaghost, at the southern edge of the Sahara. Manufactured copper goods were sent south in exchange for gold dust, to be cast into ingots out of which much of the fast­rising Arab world’s coinage was struck.2 To illustrate just how well established these commercial exchanges were by the late tenth century, Fauvelle describes an order of payment—what we might call a check3—sent by a sub­Saharan merchant to a businessman in the Moroccan town of Sijilmasa for the sum of 42,000 dinars. Fauvelle also writes of sophisticated diplomacy in the seventh century between newly Islamized Egypt and Nubia, a Christian society to its south, in the course of which the Egyptians complained that their neighbors had not been living up to one of the terms of the pact between them, which required the return of any Egyptian slaves who escaped to Nubia. Twelve hundred years later, similar complaints by the American South against the North became a major cause of the Civil War. The most intriguing story in Fauvelle’s book comes from the kingdom of Mali in the early fourteenth century. More than a century and a half before Columbus’s voyages, a Malian https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-lost-kingdoms/ 2/10 6/8/2019 Africa's Lost Kingdoms | by Howard W. French | The New York Review of Books ruler named Abu Bakr II was said to have equipped an expedition involving two hundred ships that attempted to discover “the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean.” The expedition failed to return save for one vessel, whose survivor claimed that “there appeared in the open sea [as it were] a river with a powerful current…. The [other] ships went on ahead but when they reached that place they did not return and no more was seen of them.” Some modern historians (Michael Gomez, Toby Green, and John Thornton, among others) have interpreted this to mean that the Malian ships were caught in the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Current, which sweeps everything in its path westward at about the same latitude as Mali. Abu Bakr II supposedly responded not by abandoning his dreams of exploration but by equipping a new and far larger expedition, this time involving two thousand ships and with himself in command. That was the last that was seen of him. We know of this story only because when Abu Bakr’s successor, Mansa Musa, was staying in Cairo in 1324–1325 on his pilgrimage to Mecca, the secretary of the chancery of the Mamluk Dynasty asked him how he had come to power and recorded his reply. There are no other traces of Abu Bakr’s attempt. Fauvelle expends more effort than seems warranted in knocking down widely discredited efforts to connect Abu Bakr’s expeditions to unsubstantiated claims of an African presence in the New World prior to Columbus’s voyages. He then runs through a series of alternate explanations for why Musa would have told this extraordinary story, such as a contested succession between rival branches of the ruling family or an effort by Musa to prove Mali’s Islamic bona fides by claiming that a previous ruler had martyred himself while trying to carry the religion to the unknown extremities of the Atlantic. Today the question of what befell the shadowy Abu Bakr appears to be beyond the powers of modern historical inquiry to resolve. Mansa Musa, however, who took power in 1312, left such a powerful stamp on his time that it is remarkable how little known he is today. Recently it has been claimed that he was the richest person who ever lived. Speculation over the size of his fortune (“Mansa” means ruler) is based almost entirely on his three­to­twelve­month stay in Cairo on his way to Mecca. The Arabic­language sources vary on many of the details but leave an unmistakable impression of lucre the likes of which have rarely been seen anywhere. Badr al­Din al­Halabi wrote that Musa “appeared [in Cairo] on horseback magnificently dressed in the midst of his soldiers” with more than 10,000 attendants. Another source claims that he “brought with him 14,000 slave girls for his personal service.” A third spoke of the “great pomp” of the pilgrimage, saying that Musa traveled “with an army of 60,000 men who walked before him as he rode. There were [also] 500 slaves, and in the hand of each was a golden staff each made from 500 mithqāls of gold.” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-lost-kingdoms/ 3/10 6/8/2019 Africa's Lost Kingdoms | by Howard W. French | The New York Review of Books In African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Michael Gomez, a historian at New York University, makes the intriguing point that although Musa’s extremely ostentatious use of gold is what receives most of the attention in this story, the Malian leader’s huge slave entourage may have cemented the image of Sudanic Africa as an inexhaustible source of black labor in lastingly harmful ways.4 This part of Africa had already long furnished slave markets in the Near East, and a little more than a century after Musa’s pilgrimage it would begin supplying slaves to the Portuguese and other Europeans. Contemporaneous sources estimated that the Malian emperor made the 2,700­mile trip to Cairo with between thirteen and eighteen tons of pure gold. It was handed out in mosques and to officials of all ranks along his route and given as alms to the poor.